Big Black Horse and the Cherry Tree

Friday, October 14, 2011

Basic Tenets of Singapore Foreign Policy

Retired Singaporean Diplomat and Minister noted in one of his interviews, the basic tenets of Singaporean Foreign Policy as:

Make maximum friends and minimum enemies or no enemies. Be of service to as many as you can be of service to....You don't want to go out of your way to offend or upset any country. But from time to time, a situation arises where you have to advance your interest, be consistent and principled.

Games politicians play

Divide and conquer, discriminate and please.

It's the same was what Indian politicians catering to their narrow votebanks play. And seems like the Malaysian politicians are no better with their Bumiputra politics. Respect to Lee Kuan Yew, who had the courage to say it like it is in this speech of his in Malaysian parliament. An extract:

How does the Malay in the kampong find his way out into this modernised civil society? By becoming servants of the 0.3 per cent who would have the money to hire them to clean their shoe, open their motorcar doors? ... Of course there are Chinese millionaires in big cars and big houses. Is it the answer to make a few Malay millionaires with big cars and big houses? How does telling a Malay bus driver that he should support the party of his Malay director (UMNO) and the Chinese bus conductor to join another party of his Chinese director (MCA) - how does that improve the standards of the Malay bus driver and the Chinese bus conductor who are both workers in the same company?

If we delude people into believing that they are poor because there are no Malay rights or because opposition members oppose Malay rights, where are we going to end up? You let people in the kampongs believe that they are poor because we don't speak Malay, because the government does not write in Malay, so he expects a miracle to take place in 1967 (the year Malay would become the national and sole official language). The moment we all start speaking Malay, he is going to have an uplift in the standard of living, and if doesn't happen, what happens then?

Meanwhile, whenever there is a failure of economic, social and educational policies, you come back and say, oh, these wicked Chinese, Indian and others opposing Malay rights. They don't oppose Malay rights. They, the Malay, have the right as Malaysian citizens to go up to the level of training and education that the more competitive societies, the non-Malay society, has produced. That is what must be done, isn't it? Not to feed them with this obscurantist doctrine that all they have got to do is to get Malay rights for the few special Malays and their problem has been resolved.